What There's Room For
by Anidori-Kiladra
Summary: Glimmer loses her virginity to Cato in her bedroom at the Training Center, the night before they all go to die. Glimmer/Cato


Glimmer loses her virginity to Cato in her bedroom at the Training Center, the night before they all go to die.

They've been eying each other all week long, sitting increasingly close to each other at meals, legs brushing legs and hands finding hands in the rush for weapons or the way he teaches her to tie a snare so it snaps back just right. She doesn't remember the way to twist the rope around a switch, just remembers the shape of Cato's fingers—strong and solid and square—darting in and out.

Her teachers back home would call her stupid, say she's ruining any chance she might have had if she doesn't remember everything, lets something other than concentration slip in for even a moment. But, this close to the beginning and the end, Glimmer finds that she can't make herself care.

In District 1, Glimmer's life has always been all about competition. There's been no time in her schedule and no room in her head or her body for boys. And of course here it's all about competition, too, even more than before.

But here's the difference: In District 1, Glimmer knew she was the best. Just as there was no room for boys, there was no room for the concept of losing. Here, though, Glimmer's never thought she might win. There's room for statistics, and those don't lie.

So on the night before the 74th Annual Hunger Games begin, Glimmer bites her lip and gestures Cato inside silently, puts and unnecessary hand up to gesture for silence. Cato already knows. The way his eyes and his hands are steady, Glimmer can see that he has already known all of this before. But there's a trembling in his exhale, a pulse in his neck when he throws his head back, that tells her there's something that's new for him too.

There will be a pain to dying, Glimmer knows. But it won't be sweet like this pain, won't ease toward pleasure as the manufactured backdrop in her bedroom lightens toward sunrise and Cato leaves as quietly as he entered, pressing lips to her forehead, her cheek, her lips.

In the arena, Glimmer hears herself laughing too loud when others die, pressing her cheek too hard to Cato's chest while they wait for District 12 to come down from the tree, because if she fills her head with these things—with laughter, with Cato—perhaps there will be no room for anything else.

It doesn't work, of course. Death works its way in anyway.

She only hears the tracker jackers for a minute, only sees them for a second before their poison works its way inside her, till there's nothing left of her but them.

After that it's quiet for a while.

And then she wakes again.

Glimmer feels stronger than she's ever felt, stronger than the day almost a year ago when she ran a mile around the track in District 1 and beat the rest of the girls by half a lap. Now she can run, and she does, and her head fills with smells and sounds and tastes she's never felt before, and she feels blood and her four feet pound the ground.

She's chasing, chasing the girl and the boy and the Cornucopia, and when she bursts out into the open at the head of the pack, Glimmer thinks for a moment that maybe this is what winning the Hunger Games would feel like, like tearing someone's leg between your jaws.

But the wispy insubstantial human thought of winning leaves when she sees him. Cato. Standing and grinning and bleeding.

Standing and grinning and bleeding until he's falling. Until he topples and falls and crunches and there's something in Glimmer that tells her to go to him, tells her to put her mouth on him and devour him whole. And isn't that what she's wanted, all along? To devour the world before it devours her?

Glimmer looks down at the boy whose body she's known with her own, the boy who smells like death and losing.

Glimmer never thought she would win. But she really thought he would.

In the end, it's the arrow that wins the Hunger Games, whooshes through the air as the sky turns artificial, takes that boy and takes the dark and takes the world.

And then there's no more room for anything, even if there was anything to put there.


End file.
